Download Clever Little Box Pro-Vue Interactive Technical information

This Month at Hughes Baptist Church Hall
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Main Hall
Christmas Auction!!!
Mac stuff to buy!
Games!
Quizzes!
Food and Drink!
Tuesday, 20 Dec 2011
Committee Meeting – 7.30pm –
Weston Club (formerly Royals)
Contents
ÑÑ COMMITTEE………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2
ÑÑ Rules for the Christmas Auction……………………………………………………………………………………… 3
ÑÑ 66+Remember+Your+Passwords+99………………………………………………………………………………… 5
ÑÑ Enabling Fraction Substitutions………………………………………………………………………………………… 7
ÑÑ The Mac at Nelson’s Place……………………………………………………………………………………………… 9
ÑÑ Amazon Beats Apple at Media Access………………………………………………………………………… 10
ÑÑ Australasian Heritage Software Database……………………………………………………………………… 12
ÑÑ Bits & Pieces………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 13
ÑÑ iTunes 10.5.1 Unveils iTunes Match……………………………………………………………………………… 16
ÑÑ Appcuity is the New, Better Appalicious……………………………………………………………………… 17
ÑÑ The Fine Print………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 18
Office Bearers
COMMITTEE
Other Members
President: Vacant
[email protected]
Vice-President: John Armstead
[email protected]
Secretary: Garry Brooke
[email protected]
Treasurer: David Menere
6282 5445
[email protected]
Jim Arnold
[email protected]
Tony Hill
[email protected]
Clive Monty
[email protected]
Mike Saclier
6281 4117
[email protected]
[email protected]
Richard Scotte 6282 4887
Trainng Coordinator
[email protected]
For free Technical Assistance after hours
(6pm to 9pm) the following have
volunteered their services.
Trevor Drover – 6241 7558 – Hardware, OS X,
OS 9 and earlier
Clive Huggan – 6247 0672 – MS Word, iPhoto
Ann Tündern-Smith – Ann Smith (a.smith@
netspeed.com.au) – Excel, Genealogy,
Photoshop
Garry Brooke – ([email protected])
– Basic Mac OS X, Quicken, UAE Amiga
emulation, basic MS Office and Virtual PC
As we are not computer professionals, our
expertise is limited. If your Mac requires
professional service, you can take it to
the Mac1 ANU (6257 0808), at 2 Hutton
Street, Acton or to Mac1 Fyshwick (6280
0808), at 178 Gladstone Street, Fyshwick
ACT.
For professional on-site service call Pat
“The Mac Guy” Kelly on 0412 910 968.
Please call Committee members and
helpers between 6 pm and 9 pm
only.
Page 2
The Mailing List
ACTApple User Group conducts an Email List,
the General Help and Information List.
Any member may join and post messages seeking help for Mac problems, offer assistance to other members or provide news and views on the Mac
world.
To join the list send an email to the List Administrator: Peter Sealy <[email protected]>.
Our Meeting Venue
Hughes Baptist Church Hall
Groom Street, Hughes
Please leave access to theEntrance free for those who are
bringing equipment.
Rules for the Christmas Auction
Items for the Christmas Auction must be:
ÑÑIn working order or, if out
of order but fixable, labelled
with details of the fault.
ÑÑLabelled with the name of
the donor (for return if not
sold.
ÑÑCapable of running some
version of OS X.
ÑÑException:
Pre-1988 Apple hardware which may be
considered collectable is
acceptable.
Page 3
From 7:45pm
Page 4
66+Remember+Your+Passwords+99
By Trevor Drover
Passwords are a necessary
evil these days. Passwords help
keep my iMac and portable devices safe, my data confidential,
and my money away from the
bad guys. But it frustrates me
that every time I am required to
come up with yet another password for a Web site, a user account, or any of a multitude of
other purposes, I feel, as you
probably do, that it’s too much
mental effort to produce and remember all these passwords.
But I don’t want to expose
myself to exploitation by choosing a simple password and using
it everywhere. I could be putting my identity or data or even
worse, my money, at risk. I won’t
sacrifice security for convenience.
I do use the app “1Password” to store my passwords,
but it does slow me down as I regularly have to enter my master
password so that I can access my log-in names and passwords. In
addition, coming up with a unique, easy-to-enter password is not
always easy. Read on and you will see a possible solution.
Listening to my favourite Mac Podcast recently this subject
was featured with some novel twists. To quote the author of the
cartoon courtesy of xkcd.com/936 below: “Through 20 years of
effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are
hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.”
My article will focus on creating passwords we are required to
enter to gain access to a
website, computer or portable device. This is where
the bad guys have to guess
how many characters are
in your password and what
they are. It does not cover
making passwords difficult
to decrypt if they have been
stolen from a website - Steve Neilsen has done a great
presentation on this subject
at our monthly meetings.
Also see “A Real World
Theft” below.
Steve Gibson is a programmer and security consultant who constantly sticks
it to Apple and Microsoft,
highlighting security flaws in
their software. He says on
his website: “Every password
you use can be thought of
as a needle hiding in a haystack. After all searches of
common passwords and dictionaries have failed, an attacker must
resort to a “brute force” search – ultimately trying every possible
combination of letters, numbers and then symbols until the combination you chose, is discovered.” The object is not to have a
difficult needle in a small haystack, it is to have an easy (for you)
needle in a huge haystack. More characters equals larger haystack;
Page 5
throw in some numerals, punctuation, symbols and upper-case letters and you get your huge haystack.
The basic idea is that you’re better off making your passwords
long and memorable than short and complex. In the simplified cartoon example above the password is simply made up of 4 common
words, but Steve Gibson suggests you should add some padding
around those words to make the passwords much harder to guess.
I briefly demonstrated the two websites below and discussed
passwords at the recent October 2011 meeting. It seemed to create a bit of discussion.
Password Tester
Steve Gibson has developed an Interactive Brute Force Password “Search Space” Calculator on his website: www.grc.com/
haystack which allows you to enter passwords and see his calculations for how long it would take to crack with a brute force
search (brute force search consists of trying every possible code,
combination, or password until the right one is found). Have a play
with it and see that one of the most popular passwords “123456”
would only take 18.5 minutes to crack whereas just adding three
more different characters “!Aa123456” would increase this to two
hundred thousand centuries!
Password Creator
The person leading the password discussion on the podcast,
Bart Busschots, has chipped in and created “xkpasswd” - an online secure memorable password generator: xkpasswd.net . There
you can customise the number of words to use, the length of the
words, capitalisation, letter substitutions, separators between words,
numbers before and after words and padding. With the default
settings it generated the following password for me: “---700-liftbelieve-lone-late-337---”. You can then plug this password into
Steve Gibson’s calculator and see how many trillion centuries it
will take to crack!
A Real World Theft
Before the Sony website was hacked a couple of times
earlier this year compromising over 100 million user accounts
there have been many other instances of user passwords being
stolen. In December 2009, a major password breach occurred
that led to the theft of 32 million passwords (rockyou.com).
Further, the hacker posted to the Internet the full list of the 32
million passwords (with no other identifiable information). The
passwords were stored in clear- text in the RockYou database
so no decryption was necessary. The Imperva Application Defense Center analysed the strength of the passwords and came
up with a Password Popularity Top 20 Table based on this one
site. It makes interesting reading:
Rank
Password
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
123456
12345
123456789
Password
iloveyou
princess
rockyou
1234567
12345678
abc123
Nicole
Daniel
babygirl
monkey
Jessica
Lovely
michael
Ashley
654321
Qwerty
Number of Users
with Password
290,731
79,078
76,790
61,958
51,622
35,231
22,588
21,726
20,553
17,542
17,168
16,409
16,094
15,294
15,162
14,950
14,898
14,329
13,984
13,856
Is your password one of the above?
Oh, by the way, my favourite Mac Podcast is NosillaCast by
Allison Sheridan http://podfeet.com .
Page 6
Enabling Fraction Substitutions
By Trevor Drover
Since version 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Mac OS X provides support for
system wide “Text and Symbol substitution” that can be configured in the
“Language & Text” system preference pane. This method allows you to
setup the text input system to automatically replace any thing you can
type on the keyboard with a longer string or symbols, or in this case,
fractions such as 3/8 with ⅜, or 1/2 with ½, whenever the text 3/8
or1/2 (then a space or punctuation) is typed in some applications.
I demonstrated this feature at a recent meeting and some members
asked me to provide more details, so here they are.
To configure this text substitution open the “Language & Text” preference pane in system preferences and navigate to the “Text” tab. Just
put a tick against the fractions you want to be substituted.
The text replacement will become active only after your applications
have been restarted. A limitation of this approach is that it works only in
applications that have been built using the OS X Cocoa libraries. While
this will cover the vast majority of the applications you are likely to use,
there is one notable exception: Microsoft Office for Mac does its own
thing hence this form of text substitution will not be available. Fortunately
there i⅕⅕s an easy workaround, which I will describe later.
In Pages you have to specifically enable the fractions you require in
the Auto-Correction Preference tab. You can add extra fractions in the
same way as you do for the “Language & Text” preference pane.
Some applications, such as iChat, iPhoto, Mail, Safari, and TextEdit,
can be configured to automatically replace your text with the desired
format.
To turn on text substitution features in the above applications:
A. Control-click and choose Substitutions > Show Substitutions. (In some
applications, you can also choose Edit > Substitutions > Show Substitutions.)
B. In the Substitutions window, select the text substitution features you
want to turn on.
Adding Your Own Text Substitutions
Still in the “Language & Text” system
preference pane select
“Input
Sources”
and
make sure you turn on
the “Keyboard & Character Viewer”. This puts an
icon the same as below
on your topmost menubar. If you have more
than one language selected to switch between,
then you will see the flag
for the language you are
using instead of the icon.
If you go back to the
Text tab and select the “+” plus button in the bottom left hand corner
Page 7
you can also setup a new replacement rule that, for example, replaces
“1/5” with “⅕” (see screenshot below). The “” fractions are included in
Character Viewer and can be custom added as required. For typing the
“¹” and “” and ”” characters, you can also use the Character Viewer. See
the instructions at the end of this article.
Click on the menu bar icon and select “Show Character Viewer”. A
window will appear and you select [1] “View: All Characters”, then expose
all [2] “qSymbols”, then select [3] “Numbers and Number Symbols”. With
your cursor in the appropriate place in your Word document “double-click”
the fraction to insert it into the document at the current curser point.
This works with all applications, not just Word, so is a handy tip to
keep around.
slightly different in many respects and he is working on a new edition
to come out next year. Irrespective of your version of Word, if you just
want to grab a fraction he has pre-formatted, go to page 208 of “Bend
Word to Your Will” and copy the example — it’s just below the couple
of lines of blue text. (This one is formatted for 12 point; if you prefer 11
point, there is another example below.) Then paste the fraction into your
Word document.
The example is a “half” fraction. Clive says “For other fractions, just
change the numbers. It’s easier to select by using the arrow keys on your
keyboard, e.g. by clicking at the beginning of the fraction and selecting
the first number by Shift-RightArrow. Then type the number you want (it
can be more than one digit if you wish). Then arrow-key your way to the
second number, following the fraction bar, and replace it.
To make your own, follow the instructions below the example.
If you need this fraction regularly and it isn’t in the very limited
range already included in Word’s AutoCorrect, it’s easy to create your
own AutoCorrect entry. That way, once you type the characters of this
fraction — e.g. 3/16 — then hit the space bar or a punctuation key, AutoCorrect will automatically convert it into an elegant piece of typography.
The instructions for doing that are under the heading “2. Setting up the
AutoCorrect entry”, further down page 208.
Clive told me some of the terminologies have been changed since he
wrote the notes for Word 2004. For example, in the Font window the tab
labelled “Character spacing” in Word 2004 is now “Advanced” in Word
2011. But it isn’t difficult to spot the change — and your reward will be
elegantly formatted fractions, no matter what their values.
Building Custom Fractions in Symbol and Text Substitution
Fraction substitution in Word
Despite Word “doing its own thing”, there is an easy way to permanently include fraction substitutions into Word. Clive Huggan has written
about how to format elegant fractions in his extensive document, “Bend
Word to Your Will” (see page 206). Download the document (free) here:
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html
Clive tells me that the notes apply to Word 2004; Word 2011 is
Earlier I indicated that you could build a custom fraction in “Symbol
and Text Substitution”. To do so, click the ‘+’ (plus) sign near the bottom
left corner of the Language & Text window.
Enter the shortcut text in the ‘Replace’ column (in this case “1/16”).
Enter the expanded text in the ‘With’ column. Here you have to be
creative – firstly, in the “Numbers & Number Symbols” section select the
Superscript One ([4] above) then select Punctuation > Punctuation ([5]
above) and find the “Fraction Slash” (on my iMac it was on the 13th row,
Page 8
5th character in), then go back to “Numbers & Number Symbols” and
select Subscript “1 and 6” ([6] above). Press return or enter to add your
text substitution to Snow Leopard.
[Editorial Note: If you are using Lion you may find that some
of the instructions relating to the Character Viewer are a bit confusing because of changes to that beastie. But the characters are
there!]
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Well, ‘tis the season to be jolly, so
straighten up, fly
right, and enjoy it,
damn you!
The Mac at
Nelson’s
Place
Just so you get
in the mood let me
share with you the
website that Peter
Sealy found: http://
www.etsy.com/listing/64178965/
iphone-4-andipad-christmas-ornaments?ref=sr_gallery_9&ga_search_
submit=&ga_search_query=iphone+ornament&ga_
view_type=gallery&ga_ship_to=US&ga_search_
type=handmade&ga_facet=handmade
Of course with the rush of orders they will be experiencing,
it may be too late to get your order here by Christmas.
The Gift that Keeps On Giving
How about giving your fellow members a really valuable
gift which doesn’t cost you much at all. I’m talking about volunteering to serve on the ACTApple Committee. We are still
short on numbers and we don’t have a President. With a few
more members we might actually get someone to volunteer to
step into that role.
Spam, Spam and More Spam
There appears to have been an upheaval in the spamosphere. I haven’t had anything from the widow of a Nigerian
general for ages. But there is still plenty of activity.
I wonder, in fact, if some of the Nigerians may not have
moved to the UK. Take, for example, Mr Geoffry Bell, who
writes as follows:
Hello,
Ref: Information about Your late Relation/
Family member
This is my second but final attempt to reach
you in view of this subject matter.
I am Geoffrey Bell,an Conveyancer , Investment adviser/sole executor to your late relation.There is an Estate(Cash deposit in account
and Properties) belonging to your Late family
member I will like to discuss with you; He is
related to you going by the linage,surname and
country of origin.
The style is familiar, don’t you think?
Then there is the charming Lisa Simes at a company called
winlanding.com who is anxious for me to take up currency trading. Whatever her skills as a forex trader, her abilities as a
user of Word are suspect. Her missive begins:
You are subscribed as %%emailaddress%
Dear %%First Name%%,
There are lots more.
Have a great Christmas and New Year. I’ll talk to you again
in February. Of course, whether you listen or not is up to you.
Cheers
Mike Saclier
Page 9
Amazon Beats Apple at Media
Access
by Glenn Fleishman
The Amazon Kindle Fire is not an iPad killer or even precisely
an iPad competitor. If it succeeds — and based on my first day
with it, I believe it will — the Fire will create a new intermediate
niche for those who want a device with a bigger screen than a
phone for reading, gaming, and watching video, but don’t want the
iPad bulk or price tag. (You can read my brief review at The
Economist.)
Compare this to iOS 5, which suffers from Apple’s accretive approach when it adds new kinds of media, and doesn’t
return to the information architect’s easel and rethink how
its approach is working — or not. This is Apple at its most
Microsoft-like, sadly. On the desktop, iTunes is a bloated and
distorted bag of unrelated features bursting at the seams.
But iOS doesn’t do much better by bursting out that bag into
separate sacks.
Consider this scenario. I’ve purchased a movie on my Mac
laptop that I want to continue watching on my mobile device.
With an Amazon Fire, my steps from zero to watching are:
Where Amazon can compete with Apple, however, is on the
ease of accessing media: both the items you purchased from the
company that made the tablet, and other media to which you want
access. Amazon’s Fire beats iOS hands down, even if you separately subscribe to Apple’s just-released iTunes Match.
Wake and unlock the Fire.
On the Fire, the home screen has tabs all in a row for four
divisions of media (Newsstand, Books, Music, and Video), as well
as Docs, Apps, and Web links. Tap any category except Docs and
Web, and two side-by-side buttons appear at the top when viewing
your library: Cloud and Device. Tap Cloud, and every electronic
media item you’ve ever purchased from Amazon is available for
download (all categories), or streaming for audio or video. Tap Device, and anything stored on the Fire can be accessed, launched,
or read. (There’s a necessary footnote on music, that I’ll discuss
below.)
Tap the movie.
Tap the Video tab.
If your library isn’t showing, tap Library.
Tap Cloud if it’s not selected.
Tap Play or Download.
If you tap Download, you have to wait for enough footage
to buffer before it starts playing. Tapping play uses a streaming
mode that allows for faster startup, although it seems to trade
quality — the ultimate amount of data transferred for streaming is likely less than for a download over the same video file.
On an iOS device, you
can’t transfer that movie
using any on-board app.
Instead, you:
Switch to iTunes on
the computer on which you
manage your purchased
media for that iOS device.
Connect the device to
the computer via USB if
Page 10
you haven’t enabled iTunes Wi-Fi Sync.
Select the iOS device in the sidebar’s Devices list.
Click the Movies tab.
Unless you have an automatic sync option turned on,
such as Automatically Include 3 Most Recent Unwatched, scroll
through the Movies list to find the item you purchased, and
check the box next to it.
Click Sync.
Wait for the synchronization to finish, at which point the
movie is available to play.
If you’re using USB, disconnect the device’s Dock connector to roam freely.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound as tedious to
you as it does to me, but consider further:
Amazon can let you perform the above operation from any Wi-Fi network (assuming sufficient permission and bandwidth). Apple only
allows that sync to happen from a copy of
iTunes.
It gets worse when you look at how everything is now split up in iOS 5, something I
expect Apple will need to remedy in a future
version. The Music app manages music stored
on an iOS device, and TV shows and movies are accessed via the Videos app. But to
download music you purchased that’s not on
the device, you launch the iTunes app, which
is where TV shows may also be downloaded
(purchased movies can’t be downloaded in
this fashion).
Apps are found in the App Store app
for buying, updates, and downloading of purchased items. Books are in the iBooks app,
which contains the iBookstore for downloading already purchased items. The new Newsstand app now holds most periodicals unless they have a separate app that hasn’t been
integrated yet. (The same is true on the Kindle Fire: some periodicals manage subscriptions and individual issue purchases
through the Newsstand view; others require use of a separate
app, like The New Yorker.)
The addition of the $24.99-per-year iTunes Match makes
this situation both easier and more complicated in iOS because
iTunes Match only works with music you’ve brought in from
elsewhere, not with books or video, and it only allows downloads to iOS devices of music from your collection, whether
matched in the iTunes catalog or uploaded
into your iCloud storage; you can’t stream
music and omit downloading it to your iOS
device.
Now, you can obviate one aspect of having all your purchased content everywhere. In
iOS, launch Settings and tap Store, then set
Automatic Downloads to On for any or all of
Music, Apps, and Books. TV Shows and Movies don’t qualify, and Newsstand purchases
are only managed in iOS. But this means
that every time you buy any of the supported
categories anywhere, all your hardware will
download the purchases at the next available
opportunity. That’s more reasonable with iOS
hardware, which may have from 8 GB to 64
GB of storage than with a Fire, which supports
direct purchased video downloads and has
only 8 GB.
I said earlier that Amazon’s music setup requires a footnote, as Apple’s approach,
when you figure in iTunes Match, is definitely
better for that category, omitting the issue of
Page 11
downloading versus streaming for playback. Amazon offers 5 GB
of free storage in its Cloud Drive service that’s paired with your
Amazon account, but music files aren’t currently counted against
that total. You can store unlimited music at no cost, and access
via the Web, dedicated apps, and the Kindle Fire.
When you buy music from Amazon, you can automatically add
those purchased items to your Cloud Drive, but any music that
you didn’t purchase and add in that fashion has to be uploaded
directly. There’s no match functionality, and no synchronization as
you add items from sources other than Amazon to your own music
collection.
Non-purchased books, audio, apps, and video are also much
more of a pain with Amazon. Apple lets you drag all manner of
things — so long as they are in a supported format and not
wrapped in DRM — right into iTunes. You can use Handbrake to
rip DVDs you own or copy PDFs or what have you. Amazon allows
this, too, but there’s no management program on the desktop. You
must use USB to connect a Fire, where it shows up as a volume
on the desktop, and the manage the media by dragging it or out.
(Adding apps from non-Amazon sources requires changing a setting, but it’s just a simple software switch.)
With Apple’s ecosystem, simply copying items into iTunes makes
them easily available to sync to multiple devices, and iTunes Match,
even though it requires a separate annual fee, doesn’t require
nearly as much tedious uploading, and maintains synchronization
between any new music you rip or purchase and then import into
any copy of desktop iTunes and your iCloud collection.
The Kindle Fire certainly has a lot of room to grow, and I like
this first iteration. But I’m most captivated at Amazon’s simplicity in
making media available as you want it wherever. Apple may have
cut the USB cord to iTunes, but it certainly still tethers itself to a
desktop experience split into many apps. Apple now has a bar to
meet in making media access intuitive. That’s a rare challenge.
[TidBITS 17 Nov 2011]
Garry Brooke
Australasian Heritage Software
Database
The Australasian Heritage Software Database is a project
to assemble documentation on software that has either been
written in Australia or New Zealand, or written by Australians
or New Zealanders. The website is at:
http://www.ourdigitalheritage.org/index.php
The project is being headed by Dr Melanie Swalwell, a
Senior Lecturer in Screen and Media at Flinders University
who has researched digital media histories.
The database is a public-compiled and accessible database documenting Australian and New Zealand software history. The field of software history is enormous and largely
undocumented. Few repositories of software or documentation
exist. This project aims to collect documentation from the
public – and, where feasible, source code – in order to create
a picture of the software written locally, and to present this
online.
They want to receive information about software that
either was locally created in Australia and New Zealand, or
created by locals. It can be any Australian and/or New Zealand software that people are aware of, from the earliest
mainframes to the present day.
What can I do to help?
This database is compiled by the public who can enter
details they have in a form on the Database web site. People
can upload files that they own, such as screenshots or cover
art, and even source code if they have it. People don’t have
to be the owner of the software to provide what details they
have.
If you have details about locally made software, you will
helping the project a lot if you could check the Database web
site and provide those details.
Page 12
Bits & Pieces
For a few months I have been putting aside this collection
of snippets collected from Mac web pages thinking they may
be of use to someone. No doubt some members already have
seen the content but the rest of you may not have.
Security
Security of the Mac OS has been in the news quite a lot
lately. Far moreso than in earlier times. Trojans have appeared
and, so far, been identified and knocked down but only if you
are fully protected.
A Trojan was discovered in September embedded in a fake
Adobe PDF document. Apparently this installed things in your
Home folder and attempted to access your personal data. This
malware was discovered and neutralised by Apple’s own invisible protection system [XProtect] which you installed when you
upgraded to Snow leopard and thence Lion - you did, didn’t
you? [See more on this below]
A revised variant of this Trojan was let loose, riding on
Adobe’s Flash, in October and installed itself in certain applications like Safari and Firefox. This was also apparently knocked
off by Apple. A third variant has been discovered which targets
Apple’s protection system also inside a fake Flash installer. No
doubt Apple will fix this soon; probably done so by the time
you read this.
Like previous variants of Flashback [as these Trojans have
been named], this one cannot work if you have the reverse
firewall Little Snitch installed, which monitors outbound traffic
and warns you when a program tries to communicate with a
service on the Internet. So far if the malware’s installer detects
the presence of Little Snitch then it will shut down and not
attempt to install on your system, since this program will prevent it from working and provide a quick way of detecting the
unwanted server connection attempts.
There is a way to rid yourself of this if you have been
infected and do not have XProtect or can not wait: see here:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20122551-37/
flashback-os-x-malware-variant-disables-xprotect/ >
I have not done this as I believe I am not infected.
More info:
<http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20114770-263/
revir-malware-for-os-x-undergoes-revision/>
<http://www.macworld.com/article/60823/2007/10/
trojanhorse.html#lsrc.mod_rel>
<http://www.macworld.com/article/142457/2009/08/
snowleopard_malware.html#lsrc.mod_rel>
Apple’s Protection System
Apple installed a silent invisible [to you] malware protection
code in your Snow Leopard and Lion systems called XProtect.
It detects Trojans and presumably other bad things and sends
updated malware definitions transparently to your computer. I
am unsure how often Apple checks your computer for any malware as I have seen quite a few differing time frames claimed
on the web. However don’t be smug and even though it’s there
hidden, do not abandon your usual security precautions such
as don’t download anything from strange sites that you don’t
recognise.
You can check if you have the latest updated protection
from Apple, see here:
<http://www.macworld.com/article/160253/2011/06/
force_mac_update_malware_definitions.html#lsrc.mod_rel>
iPhone Security
Researchers at US Georgia Tech have discovered a way to
key log your computer through your compromised iPhone.
<http://www.macworld.com/article/163105/2011/10/researchers_discover_keyboard_keylogger_attack_via_iphone.html>
Page 13
<http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.
html?nid=71506>
Bluetooth signal strength. I do not know if this available in
earlier OS versions. See here:
Protection = do not leave your iPhone close to your computer.
<http://hints.macworld.com/article.
php?story=2011091514050082 >
Security of Siri On iPhone 4S
Apparently Siri on your iPhone 4S can be used to make
calls and send emails and texts even though you have it passcode locked.
Repair Permissions
I have not run ‘Repair Permissions’ for years as I see no
point in it. I know other Mac Users do so and swear by it. But
the for and against argument seems like a Middle East peace
conference so we won’t go there.
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20122632-37/
bad-siri-shell-let-anyone-use-a-locked-iphone-4s/>
Security of Google Chrome Browser
In May this year Google began encrypting Chrome web
searches by default for signed in users. Others have to manually set encryption until Google enables default encryption for
all. I was not aware of this and as Chrome is my primary web
browser and search engine I have now enabled encryption. I
hope Google does this quickly because encrypted searches involve a two step entry of the search term, for me at least as I
am not a G Mail customer and thus am not permanently signed
in to Google. Maybe someone who has done this manual fix
can tell us a shortcut.
<http://www.zdnet.com.au/google-to-encrypt-searchesby-default-339324584.htm>
<http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thr
ead?tid=2bb320ad0f84ec93&hl=en>
That’s enough for Security, let’s move on.
Bluetooth
If you use a Bluetooth connection it may be useful to know
the strength of the signal. The signal strength obviously varies
depending on the location of the two devices relative to each
other.
OS X 10.7 Lion has a way of telling you where is the best
But interestingly Apple has introduced a second ‘Repair
Permissions’ which is hidden from the ordinary user. Apple has
installed a lot of stuff which is hidden from mere mortal users,
for example Lion’s Home Folder Library, because they think you
have no need to see it if everything else ‘just works’ or if they
do not want to run the risk of you meddling with things which
don’t or shouldn’t concern you. Apparently Lion only — don’t
know about any other OS version. See here:
<http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2011/09/
want-to-really-repair-permissions-on-yourmac-try-this/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_
medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+houstonchronicle/
techblogfulltext+(TechBlog+-+Full+Text)>
Reset Home Folder Permissions
This topic is different from the one above. Snow Leopard
and Lion, don’t know about other OS versions. This procedure
may well obviate a system restore. See here:
<http://www.fixkb.com/2011/08/reset-home-folder-permissions.html>
Automatic Maintenance
Many years ago, in 2004 actually, I wrote an article for the
Newsletter about OS X automatic housekeeping tasks. These
tasks were referred to as cron jobs and cleaned up some the
system’s hidden maintenance requirements of cleaning caches,
Page 14
rearranging logs and removing out of date crud. These tasks
ran automatically by the cron application daily, weekly and
monthly. You may remember there were a number of third
party applications which would run these tasks for you when
you chose rather than relying on Apple’s internal timing. One
of the best known of those applications was Macjanitor.
Fast forward now to OS X 10.7 Lion. Searching in the same
System Log files [Console>SYSTEM LOG QUERIES>/var/log] I
find that these tasks are still being run automatically but much
more efficiently. This process is most probably one that you
have forgotten about and not missed. The fact that Macjanitor has not been updated for some time, since OS X 10.2,
indicates how much Apple has improved this process. The cron
jobs will now certainly run if your Mac is asleep.
This is an example of the ‘under the hood’ type improvements which Apple talks about at every system update but
which most of never see. Just shows how far OS X has come
in its development: remember having to download a script
to run permissions check, remember running ‘fsck’ separately
when that is now done for you every time you cold boot, remember when you had to boot from a separate disk to run
repair permission, remember when defrag your hard drive was
considered necessary, you now can have automatic backup
by Time Machine and great improvements have been made to
applications such as Safari, Mail, Preview and TextEdit is now
a word processor for most of us. Of course these are all just
forward steps along the way. When was the last time you had
a system crash?
all those Flash cookies for you. Why do it? Well by and large
I suppose cookies don’t do much harm and can assist you by
rapid retrieval of web sites. But I just don’t like the idea of stuff
being downloaded and retained on my computer which I do not
know about. That is also why I use Ghostery which I wrote an
article about a few months ago. I am fully aware of Google’s
retention of all my search data and a lot more besides. But
I just try to make it as hard for them as I can! I have Flush
installed and it works for systems as far back as OS X 10.3.
See here and it’s free:
<http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/32994/flush>
That’s all for now.
Feel free to offer suggestions or corrections.
Peter Sealy
[email protected]
Flush
I have written previously about how Flash conceals cookies and other stuff from web sites which Safari visits. And I
showed how to clear them out of your system. That can be
a bit laborious unless someone has written an Applescript or
Automator action to do it but I have never found one. Well
there is a third party application named Flush which will remove
Page 15
iTunes 10.5.1 Unveils iTunes Match
by Adam C. Engst
Apple has released iTunes 10.5.1, which finally unveils the
overdue iTunes Match (see “iCloud Rolls In, Extended Forecast
Calls for Disruption,” 6 June 2011). The iTunes Match service,
which costs $24.99 per year and is currently available only to U.S.
customers, enables you to store your entire music library in the
cloud and then play it from any of your computers or iOS devices.
What sets iTunes Match apart from services like Amazon
Cloud Player (see “Amazon Puts Your Music in the Cloud,” 2
April 2011) and the limited-access Music Beta by Google is that
iTunes Match doesn’t require you to upload all your music. Instead,
iTunes Match scans your iTunes library and uploads only those of
your songs that it cannot match with songs in the iTunes Store.
For tracks that do match, iTunes Match simply connects them with
Apple’s copies instead of uploading, saving you vast amounts of
time and bandwidth during setup, and saving Apple vast amounts
of storage space that would otherwise be wasted on millions of
duplicate copies of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
The other big advantage of iTunes Match is that matched
tracks are provided to you at 256 Kbps AAC, in a DRM-free format. If you ripped much of your music from CD many years ago,
it may be in 128 Kbps MP3 format or worse, so the iTunes Match
versions of the songs may be of noticeably higher sound quality.
Assuming that you’ll be able to keep these higher quality versions
even if you allow your iTunes Match subscription to lapse in a
year, $25 isn’t a bad price to pay for not having to re-rip numerous old CDs into modern encoding formats.
Once your library is either matched or uploaded, you can
stream your music to your iTunes-authorized Macs running iTunes
10.5.1 or to your iOS devices running iOS 5.0.1. (On an iOS device,
just turn on Settings > Music > iTunes Match.) iTunes 10.5.1 itself
requires only Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later on a PowerPC- or
Intel-based Mac, making it significantly more backwards-compatible
than iCloud, which is available only for 10.7.2 Lion. iTunes 10.5.1
also runs on Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Windows 7,
which could be welcome for accessing your music library at work.
There are some caveats. First, if you have more than 25,000
songs in your iTunes library that were not purchased from the
iTunes Store, iTunes Match won’t let you sign up at all (presumably you can fool it by creating a slimmed-down library). Second,
iTunes Match won’t upload songs that are over 200 MB in size or
that are encoded as AAC or MP3 with a bit rate lower than 96
Kbps. Third, songs in ALAC, WAV, or AIFF formats will be transcoded to temporary AAC 256 Kbps files before being uploaded,
but the originals will remain untouched. All other unmatched content will be uploaded as is. Fourth and finally, DRM-shackled songs
purchased outside the U.S. iTunes Store will not be matched or
uploaded.
iTunes 10.5.1 is a
102 MB download; it’s
not yet appearing in
Software Update for
me, and the Download link on its Apple
Support
Downloads
page is currently incorrect. However, you can
download it from the
iTunes Download page,
and it will undoubtedly
appear in Software Update shortly.
[TidBITS
2011]
14
Nov
Page 16
Appcuity is the New, Better Appalicious
by Matt Neuburg
In “Appalicious Makes the Mac App Store Useful,” 1 September 2011, I described ProVUE’s clever application Appalicious, which
presents information from the Mac App Store far more helpfully,
neatly, and completely than Apple’s own App Store application. Now,
in response to threatened legal action, Appalicious has changed its
name to Appcuity, and its Web site has been renamed (and helpfully reorganized). In addition, ProVUE has taken this opportunity to
implement some feature improvements.
The Appcuity database now tracks Apple’s Top Charts rankings,
based on download counts for free apps and gross sales for paid
apps, to form a new statistic called Rank. App ranks are displayed
as a column of numbers in the Appcuity main window, along with
historical information such as the highest rank a given app has ever
achieved, plus a more extended history in the app’s detail window,
so you can see how an app changes rank over time.
the subscription model altogether.
ProVUE requests that existing Appalicious users download Appcuity promptly, as the online database will soon cease accepting data
update requests from copies of Appalicious. The switch to Appcuity
is completely transparent; your Appalicious subscription is turned
into an Appcuity subscription automatically, behind the scenes. I
downloaded Appcuity and launched it, and it immediately displayed
my existing Appalicious data and then updated that data based on
my existing subscription, just as if Appcuity and Appalicious were the
same application; since this was the same machine, I didn’t even
need to re-enter my license information.
Appcuity is a 27.6 MB download. It requires a Mac that can
access the Mac App Store (meaning Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later). New
users automatically experience Appcuity as Appcuity Pro for a week;
after that, it becomes Appcuity Lite unless you buy a Pro subscription
or get a friend to try Appcuity.
[TidBITS 14 Nov 2011]
Equally intriguing are changes to Appcuity’s pricing model. (Disclaimer: Some of these changes may have been implemented in
response to my suggestions.)
Previously, if you didn’t purchase a subscription or extend your
subscription through recommendations to a friend, Appalicious eventually stopped updating its data from the online master database.
Now, Appcuity keeps working even without a subscription, updating
itself from the master database once a week. At this level (called
Appcuity Lite), some customization features and certain column and
history displays are disabled. Thus, there is no serious reason why
you shouldn’t try Appcuity and keep using it for as long as you like,
for free; even at this Lite level, Appcuity will still be more informative
than Apple’s App Store application.
In addition to one-year and two-year subscriptions, the paid version of Appcuity (now termed Appcuity Pro) is now available through
a one-time permanent license payment of $21.99, in effect bypassing
Page 17
The Fine Print
newsletter are identical. Newsletter Contributions may be e-mailed to [email protected], handed to the editor at meetings or mailed to
ACTApple does not condone illegal copying of Commercial or Shareware software either as part of the Group’s activities or using the Group’s
equipment.
Unless held by the author as indicated, copyright on all material
in the ACTApple Newsletter rests with the editor. Articles by ACTApple members may be reprinted by non-profit organisations, provided
that credit is given to the authors.
Aim: The aim of the ACT Apple Users Group Inc. (ACTApple) is to
educate the general community in the use and enjoyment of Apple Macintosh computers through presentations, lectures, demonstrations, workshops,
technical one-on-one assistance, the ACTApple web site and this newsletter.
Membership is open to any person with an interest in Apple Macintosh computers. The Annual fee is $60 for ordinary members who
receive a printed newsletter, $30 for those who receive the emailed version.
Organisations pay the ordinary membership fee for the first organisational
member ($60 or $30 depending on whether a hardcopy or emailed newsletter is chosen) and either $50 or $20 for each additional newsletter of
the nominated kind.
General Meetings of ACTApple are held on the second Tuesday of
each month (except January) at the Hughes Baptist Church Hall, Groom
Street, Hughes, commencing at 7.30 pm.
The ACTApple Newsletter is published monthly (except for January)
and distributed, in hardcopy or electronic format, to all financial ACTApple
members. Complimentary copies are sent to Apple user groups interstate
on a reciprocal basis.
The contents of both the hardcopy and the electronic versions of the
The Editor,
ACT Apple Users Group,
Box 1231 GPO,
Canberra, ACT, 2601.
Views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual authors/
contributors, and may not reflect the views of ACTApple generally. Technical
information is provided in good faith on a “use at your own risk” basis.
Newsletter deadline is c.o.b. on the third Tuesday of the month prior
to the month of publication.
Advertising: Deadline is the same as for the newsletter. Small (single
column, halfpage or less) advertisements on computer related issues by
ACTApple members will be published free of charge, non-members will be
charged $10 per individual small ad (space permitting). Further details of
charges for computer related advertisements, including ads by commercial
organisations, are available from the Editor or any Committee member.
The Apple Logo, the words “Apple”, “Macintosh” and “Mac” are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
Layout and design of the newsletter are in Adobe® InDesign® CS5 V7.
https://secure.safaribooksonline.com/promo.asp?code=ORAUG&portal=oreilly&CMP=OT15043